I've been playing a bit with GNU Screen and start-stop-daemon today, trying to rewrite the irssi init.d script (which allows me to run irssi within GNU Screen upon boot).

When it comes down to IRC clients, there's not many that can be compared to flexibility and extendibility provided by irssi (http://irssi.org/), an excellent terminal-based client, which combined with the GNU Screen (http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/) can provide constant presence on IRC channels of any network (provided that you have a constantly working server/desktop connected to the Internet).

The init.d scripts are very useful when it's necessary to run some application once the system is up and running. There are many init.d scripts in almost any GNU/Linux distribution, and they mostly satisfy the needs of an average user. But sometimes it's hard to find either a good or a working init.d script for a less used task.